Filbert

Building a full featured contenteditable editor was a lot harder than I thought. I hit several dead-ends and contemplated quitting at least twice. I worked on it mostly early mornings, some weekends and a few vacations. It's built entirely in JavaScript - Svelte on the frontend and Express on the backend. A key ingredient to my success in completing the editor was using ImmutableJS for the data model that powers the content. Prior to that there were issues with references to mutable variables that I simply couldn't trace.

I was sitting in a hotel in the gold country (Amador City) and I decided that I would build a world-class writing platform. I was writing a lot of "drafts" on Medium and found its support for organizing private (unpublished) documents really limited.